Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the fourth richest man in the world according to the billionaires list of Forbes, has sold about 1 percent of the stock that he owns in the online retail giant.
The sale, which involved just over 1 million Amazon shares, netted Bezos $671 million before taxes, which is not a bad sum of money at all.
The share sale was detailed in a filing posted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, with Bezos now having his ownership of Amazon reduced to a bit more than 17 percent with 81.91 million shares. The sale also represents the largest amount of stock that Bezos has ever sold, in terms of the value of the shares. In August 2015, Bezos sold a slightly less number of stocks, which was then valued at $534 million.
The higher price of shares for this sale of Bezos was due to the strong growth that Amazon reported for the first quarter of this year, with the company posting its biggest net income ever of $513 million, which is about $1.07 per share. Sales of the company rose by 28 percent to $29.1 billion, with Amazon Web Services booking a 64 percent increase.
With Amazon beating the expectations of analysts in terms of its earnings in the first quarter, the stocks of Amazon surged, further boosting the net worth of Bezos by about $6 billion in after-hours trading on April 28, up to $58.6 billion.
Making $671 million is not the only thing that Bezos did with his shares though, as he also showed his magnanimous side.
Bezos gifted 3,141 shares to an unnamed nonprofit organization, the filing revealed. The value of the gift was about $2 million. The Amazon CEO also gave a gift of 741 shares, though no details about that were disclosed.
Amazon has projected revenues of $28 billion to $30.5 billion for the current quarter, and if the company hits its targets, its value and Bezos' net worth will surely climb once again.
